


You Will Buy Our Blood With Your Own Blood

by HopelessBanana



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Coda, Episode 63 spoilers, Gen, Short & Sweet, The Stolen Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 08:04:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10940379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopelessBanana/pseuds/HopelessBanana
Summary: Merle feels anger. He feels hope. Episode 63 coda, spoilers.





	You Will Buy Our Blood With Your Own Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sonata Arctica's "Blood".

The first thought to strike him is how devastatingly normal this man looks. Sharply suited, neat hair speckled with grey. Like any middle-aged businessman: professional, tidy. Perhaps there’s something unearthly about that by itself, something a little unsettlingly constructed and artificial, but it’s the sort of facade people are used to, the sort that makes sense even if it isn’t quite real.

 

The suit, the hair, the even speech, the strong set of his shoulders - it’s order. It’s law. It’s coherent and sensible.

 

The Hunger is something else altogether: a bright mess of chaos and colour so unlike the soft grey streaks in this man’s carefully gelled hair, unlike the soft grey of his clothes. In the monotony of this room, so empty and carefully inoffensive, Merle finds the Hunger more frightening than he ever has before.

 

He struggles to imagine that this man, so painstakingly put together, is at the core of such a vast, unfathomable being.

 

John says “I must look pretty beautiful from your perspective.” Merle supposes that, strictly speaking, he isn’t wrong. There’s something beautiful in those flashes of light in the dark. He does not think those lights are John, or whatever the being John has become is. For now he tells himself those little lights, in blue, in pink, in yellow, in green, are flashes of hope. And Merle thinks that the most beautiful thing ever created is hope.

 

He remembers multicoloured flashes through the windows of a church. He remembers bricks breaking down, the gentle blue glow of the walls, pieces of what he built crumbling around him, his body pulling apart into loose silver threads. He remembers so much of that moment on the mushroom planet. What he remembers most, what tugs at his heart like the pluck of a violin string, is the hope on his congregation’s faces.

 

_ “We do not know, just like we do not know in our lives, if we are going to head into darkness or light,” _ he thinks. He prays, staring into the brown eyes of the man who somehow became the Hunger that would consume worlds. He thinks that, no, it is not the Hunger that is beautiful, but all of the worlds within it, and all the sparks of hope that still burn somewhere on those lost planes.

 

Merle dies over and over again, and he keeps going back. 

 

John asks him all sorts of things. He wants information on the Starblaster, and Merle feels a crawling up his spine, a wrongness he can’t quite place, he can just imagine Pan shaking his head furiously, discouraging him from saying anything, telling him to lie or  _ something _ , but within this zone of truth he has no choice. He is honest. He thinks John is too. 

 

Merle tries to learn more. He wins him over slowly, like unfolding and drawing out a map, piece by piece.  _ Here _ , he learns the nature of the beast, and over _ here _ he finds out who John is. He is a cartographer, climbing a mountain to find the altitude where he can see the world from above and finally, finally understand. Then he inks in the contour lines that show him  _ why _ . The world shapes itself before him, into a blind rage.

 

“Are we friends?” he asks, because it’s been years, it’s been  _ lives _ , and he isn’t sure himself now. Enough conversations about the deeper meaning of life and enough games of chess can blur the lines, even when every time they meet it ends in his murder, even if they are racing each other endlessly across time and space. Or maybe they’re chasing each other? Even that is ambiguous. Merle hates how unsure John makes him at times.

 

But when he listens to him speak, listens to him talk in all earnestness about “eternity”, he feels anger seize within him, and he catches onto one of the first threads of certainty he’s found since he first met this slender man in a suit, standing at the head of a table in a high tower overlooking a city. This, he knows, is a man with the power to destroy the world with a flick of a hand. Certainly to destroy him, however temporarily. A man, an ordinary man with power, is the most terrifying thing Merle can think of. Never mind eternity. Merle is a man of faith. He has Pan. He has  _ hope _ . He has the love of his family, six figures floating in the peripherals of his mind, blurry streaks of bright red optimism. 

 

John has power. It is not unlimited.

 

Merle thinks of those strands of colour washing in a sea of nothingness. He listens to John’s words, “ _ To live is horrible! _ ”, and he remembers another sea - blue, with the crew of the Starblaster next to him, and golden sand, thinks of the love he watched begin to bloom between Barry and Lup, the presents he crafted for each of them (however badly received, and he isn’t stupid, he  _ knows _ , and however ill he may have wound up because of them), Magnus’ brash but well-meant antics, Taako’s dark silhouette out on the waves against a blood orange sunrise, Davenport sinking his bare toes into sea foam and letting out a relaxed sigh, and Lucretia, quiet, bent studiously over a canvas for hours. And how can life be horrible when he remembers that portrait of the seven of them, one drawn out with every piece of love the woman who might as well be his daughter could muster to show how much their bonds mean?

 

He imagines a world like the one John describes. He understands how he could convince so many to join him. Eternity is the worst possible ending for those living in fear, and the man is a public speaker. No. He is a demagogue. Merle can see why people might give up everything to be saved from that. “You will call us Ascendent,” John says. No. He won’t. 

 

Because John called this  _ thing _ that is eating up all this life and joy a creature of bonds. How dare this man corrupt the word. His “bonds” are nothing.

 

“ _ Kiss my ass, you sanctimonious bastard," _ he spits.

 

He feels no guilt when John’s eyebrows knit together and his face falls for a second, into something between confusion and disappointment. “Huh. I feel sad.”

 

What he feels, as he knits back together on the deck of the Starblaster, surrounded by the people he has already died countless times to protect, and would gladly die a thousand more, is righteous fury. But then Davenport runs to grab him and pull him into a close hug, with Taako close behind, until all seven of them are huddled together.

 

_ “We do not know, just like we do not know in our lives, if we are going to head into darkness or light,” _ he reminds himself. He closes his eyes, surrounded by the warmth of his family, the smell of home, and determines to take a hold of one of those beautiful ribbons of hope still swirling in the depths of the Hunger. He will pull on that thread until it unravels. 

**Author's Note:**

> Suddenly I'm way too invested in TAZ.


End file.
